‘But it’s different now. I can’t believe you thought otherwise. We’re friends. We work together. We understand each other. We put up with each other. We know when to stay around and when to leave each other alone. We’re a team, Grim. I’d never have worked out the truth about Branoc and Ness without you. And what about tonight? Have you forgotten I was going to turn my back on Prince Oran and Lady Flidais and the whole mess, until you came out to Silverlake and stopped me? Without the evidence you gathered, I’d never have seen how wrong I was. Without the hard talking you were brave enough to give me, I’d never have understood how Mathuin was skewing my thinking.’ I drew a deep breath. ‘The fact is, I can’t do without you. We’re friends.’ It came to me, through a blur of tears, that we’d been friends since the wretched, lice-ridden days in Mathuin’s lockup. Only, back then, I’d been too eaten up with bitterness to see it. In that place, we’d kept each other alive.

‘Can we go home now?’ I asked.

He took a step toward me. An awkward, stumbling step; he must be cramped with cold. I took one toward him and slipped my arm through his. ‘Home,’ I said. ‘Come on, you foolish big man.’

We made our way back to the path, and down the hill beside the still waters of Dreamer’s Pool, on which the moon now shone again, making a silver mirror. A white owl passed over in whispering flight, and a small creature cried out, deeper in the wood. Was that a cloaked figure I could see, shadowy under the birches? A pair of fey eyes under a dark hood, watchful as we passed?

By the back door, the little dog sat where I had left her, waiting for us. We went in. I hung up my dripping cloak; Grim stripped off his wet clothing in the lean-to and emerged clad in a blanket, conjuring a sharp memory.

I stirred up the fire. ‘Brew?’

‘You sit down awhile. I’ll make it.’

‘Let go of that blanket to fetch herbs, and you’ll show me a sight I really don’t want to see right now. What I want’s a friend, not a . . . you know.’

‘Take a lot to shock you,’ said Grim, managing a smile. ‘You fetch the herbs, I’ll boil the water. Team, aren’t we?’

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the team at Pan Macmillan Australia: Claire Craig, Libby Turner, Brianne Collins and my publicist, Eve Jackson; and to Anne Sowards and her team at Penguin US. I’m grateful to my wonderful agent, Russell Galen, for his ongoing support and his enthusiasm for the Blackthorn & Grim project. To my daughter Elly, a big thankyou for helping me with some gnarly plot puzzles.